06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Ok kids, time for the weekly roundup of what we've covered this week:

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• The MobileRead wiki turns 8 years old

05:53 PM by DaleDe in Miscellaneous | Announcements

The MobileRead wiki turns 8 years old this month. You can see a history and status of the wiki at Wiki Statistics. To celebrate this event I have redone the eBook Reader Matrix with an all new page with all new devices. All of the products shown are available this year. I saved the original E-book Reader Matrix page for posterity. It has 1.9 million views and was around even before the wiki existed. It now shows what may have been the heyday of eBook readers but it out of date with the current generation of products.

The wiki itself continues to grow with over 1200 pages in the main pages and over 1300 total content pages. It has a viewership of over 27 million views. The top 3 pages have more than 1 million views each and the top 7 is over 500,000. Kindle is well represented with 10 of the top 30 pages and 12 pages with over 100,000 views. Of course this wiki is for everyone and anyone can edit it to improve the content. It will take a lot of us to keep the pages up to date. So take a look and add to the knowledge base. Remember there is a link to the wiki at the top of the forum page. It is meant to be a handy reference for forum topics and a knowledge base for all things Mobile Read.

Thanks to all that have helped with the wiki. Without you the wiki would be sparse and inaccurate.

Enjoy,
Dale

09:14 AM by Dopedangel in E-Book General | News

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/10/56...orm-comixology

I hope this doesn't mean I will loose access to my collection. Amazon does not sell Kindle here or ebooks.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Is it really Sunday again? Hoorah! Time to dig in to another digest of MobileRead delectables

E-Book General - News

• Kobo No Longer at Ebates
• E Ink forecasts loss as ebook device demand falls

10:13 AM by charmian in E-Book General | News

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/.../29/2003586752

“E Ink needs to strengthen its non-e-book businesses in order to better its financial performance,” Taipei-based Horizon Securities analyst Stanley Hsu (許家銘) said by telephone.

Hsu said the global ebook device market will no longer be able to achieve high shipment growth due to the rise of tablets, since consumers are able to read ebooks offered by Amazon or Kobo on their tablets.

Citing studies by Horizon Securities, Hsu said shipments of e-book devices reached a peak of 20 million units in 2012 and then fell to 16 million units last year.

The e-ink reader market is not doing too well (double digit percentage decline). This makes me suspect this year we'll see only incremental spec bumps in new e-ink readers (if any).

10:08 AM by issybird in E-Book General | News

I went to purchase a book at Kobo just now and noticed that my Ebates button didn't go green. When I checked, I found that Kobo is no longer among the stores offering rebates through Ebates.com.

It used to be a very nice deal, especially as the rebate was alway calculated on the Kobo price before any coupons; the 5% back they offered most recenty translated to 95% off during the recent madness. Earlier, their 10% rebate knocked $13 off the price of my Glo, although I bought it with a $60 coupon.

The end of an era. And it makes me wonder if, now that Sony is dead in North America, if Kobo isn't poised to cut back on the deals and discounts. The generous coupons during the most recent contest perhaps suggest the alternative. Frankly, I don't get what's going on, but that's Kobo.

10:08 AM by fjtorres in E-Book General | News

US antitrust is primarily about consumer harm (hence the recent compensation awards) but it also offers (small) companies a venue for redress of anticompetitive behavior by other companies.
The bar is normally pretty high so there are few filings and even less successes but there is one big exception: when a company (or group) has already been found guilty of antitrust violations, the judge's findings of fact become indisputable "evidence" on which competitors claiming harm can base their claims of damages. The most recent example being the Microsoft antitrust case where the Judge ruled that MS had caused Netscape no harm but that their attempt to do so consituted an antitrust violation and thus he put them under antitrust monitoring for a decade. This was followed by dozens of private lawsuits from software companies seeking and often getting payouts, often for the results of their own bad decisions.
The bar is set high for anticompetitive antitrust cases but once it is lowered the claims multiply, which is why most targets of federal antitrust action settle with "no admision of guilt" to keep the evidence out of the public record.

In the price fix conspiracy case, the publishers settled to limit liability but since Apple refused to settle, the evidence and findings still ended up in the public record. Now comes word of the fallout: small independent ebookstores that have folded or died stillborn are suing Apple and the publishers for anticompetitive behavior, painting themselves as collateral damage of the conspirators' favoritism towards Apple.

Publishing Weekly has a (very slightly slanted) report on the lawsuits and the plaintiffs:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...st-claims.html

In DNAML vs. Apple Inc. et al, filed in September, 2013, the upstart Australian e-book retailer alleges the company was harmed "directly and as a proximate result" of the 2010 price-fixing scheme executed by Apple and the five agency publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Penguin). Now, this month, two related cases have been accepted by Cote: one filed by Lavoho, LLC, a "successor" to the Diesel eBook Store; and another from Abbey House Media, formerly BooksonBoard.

The most recent suits offer virtually identical claims to DNAML's 2013 suit—that the 2010 agency switch destroyed the retailers' ability to compete on price. All three plaintiffs share representation, and according to a letter filed by plaintiff attorneys after a January 2014 conference, the plaintiffs expect the cases to be consolidated.

The suits contain nearly identical preambles detailing Apple's liability finding by Judge Cote, and they press nearly identical claims: that the illegal collusion between Apple and the publishers ended the retailers' ability to bundle, discount, promote or otherwise engage in retail price competition, thus destroying each nascent e-book business. In each complaint, the plaintiffs were said to have business models "predicated on aggressive price competition."

PW takes a skeptical view of the suits because of the small size of the companies filing but anybody who remembers the aftermath of the Microsoft case knows that it is the smaller players that receive the most sympathetic treatment in court under antitrust enforcement. (Especially when the judge is annoyed.) And that once the small players win, the bigger ones pile on.

And in this case, if the small Adept-based ebookstores can make a case that gheh were harmed by the conspiracy to reduce competition in the BPH ebook market, then so can Adobe, Sony, and Google. And, because the Agency pricing of ebooks enabled Nook and Kindle to sell eink readers at or below cost, so can hardware-only reader vendors like Pocketbook, Bookeen, Aztak, etc. (Essentially anybody that signed up to sell generic Adept ebooks and hardware has at least a ghost of a chance.)

Once the rulings start piling up, the lawsuits start snowballing.
Just ask Microsoft; they ended up paying out billions.

Apple really should have settled.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you've been too busy to check out MobileRead this week, check out our usual roundup:

E-Book General - News

• Diesel ebooks shutting down?

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• April 2014 Book Club Vote